"Sean penn if you love venezuela please move to venezuela for a year. But rent a house in guarenas or guatire to see how long you last clown.”—Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, suggesting continued irritation with the bromance between two-time Oscar winner and three-term-going-onto-life President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, in his June 8, 2011 tweet.Several years ago, congratulating a novelist friend on his latest work, I asked who he could imagine playing his hero. “Sean Penn,” he replied--echoing the exact same thought I had.
Twenty years from now, when he is retired from film or edging closer to it, Penn will receive a lifetime achievement award from Hollywood, and he will be one of its most richly deserving recipients. But his political judgments are a thousand times less sure-footed than his creative ones.
Penn resembles nobody so much as Ira Ringold, the “Communist” in Philip Roth’s novel I Married a Communist. Roth sympathetically depicts Ringold's plight as a blacklist victim, but he is also too penetrating and honest a novelist not also to show the character's hopeless naivete--and willingness to perform hair-trigger ideological turns--in his allegiance to a foreign figure whose faults he ignores. Unfortunately, Penn reveals a similar ideological blindness.
The actor seems to operate under the motto, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” His principal “enemy,” George W. Bush, is now retired, but he continues to cherish an abiding affection for those who gave the symbolic finger to the former President. Men like Hugo Chavez.
Ozzie Guillen has taken all that he can of this. He had already taken issue with Penn for saying the American media falsely perpetuate the image of Venezuela as a dictatorship. Now, the White Sox manager has become so apoplectic by Penn’s more recent assertion in The Huffington Post that this reputation constitutes "defamation, not only to President Chavez, but also to the majority of Venezuelan people“ that he has become virtually incoherent, as shown in his recent tweet.
But then again, he is merely mirroring a similar state in Penn. Okay, so you have well-justified suspicions that the American media are so lazy that they like to peddle stereotypes. But do you then claim, as Penn has done, that “one goes to prison for these kinds of lies”? Only if you live in Venezuela, where freedom of the press is increasingly being abridged, rather than in the U.S., still under the protection of the First Amendment.
If you're Penn, you don’t even have to accept the say-so of media that you seem to think, against all evidence, swallowed whole the assertions of Bush (with whom they had little sympathy) about Chavez’s electoral bad faith. In fact, you could have looked to an entirely nonpartisan international source, Amnesty International, which in a report last year charged that Chavez and his minions “have established a pattern of clamping down on dissent through the use of legislative and administrative methods to silence and harass critics. Laws are being used to justify what essentially seems to be politically motivated charges, which would indicate that the Venezuelan government is deliberately targeting opponents."
In her post on the dispute, Caitlin Dickson, a blogger for The Atlantic, refers to Guillen as “infamously hot-tempered.” You’ll find no argument from this quarter--nor, indeed, from virtually any baseball fan (nor, I daresay, Guillen himself)--about that.
However, Dickson seems to have forgotten Penn’s own well-earned reputation for volatility. Paparazzi who’ve tangled with him have not, however.
Penn’s Hollywood colleague, actress-singer Maria Conchita Alonso, has, unlike Guillen, answered the actor point by point. After reading the actor's claim to talk-show host Bill Maher that Venezuela’s elections in the Chavez era were “transparent,” she wrote an open letter to Penn demonstrating why this was not so. Moreover, for the benefit of the American media-loathing actor, she explained why the situation was far worse in Venezuela, where Chavez controls more than 90% of media outlets.
A native of Cuba who lived for a long time in Venezuela, Alonso demonstrated the kind of historical perspective and direct experience that eluded Penn. She knows firsthand how Hollywood romanticized Fidel Castro in his first couple of decades in power (until, perhaps, his gay-bashing became infamous in Tinseltown), and sees incipient signs of the same syndrome now in a respected actor who overlooks the many faults of a caudillo who wants to become Castro’s successor as the man who defies the norteamericanos.
Ozzie Guillen has taken all that he can of this. He had already taken issue with Penn for saying the American media falsely perpetuate the image of Venezuela as a dictatorship. Now, the White Sox manager has become so apoplectic by Penn’s more recent assertion in The Huffington Post that this reputation constitutes "defamation, not only to President Chavez, but also to the majority of Venezuelan people“ that he has become virtually incoherent, as shown in his recent tweet.
But then again, he is merely mirroring a similar state in Penn. Okay, so you have well-justified suspicions that the American media are so lazy that they like to peddle stereotypes. But do you then claim, as Penn has done, that “one goes to prison for these kinds of lies”? Only if you live in Venezuela, where freedom of the press is increasingly being abridged, rather than in the U.S., still under the protection of the First Amendment.
If you're Penn, you don’t even have to accept the say-so of media that you seem to think, against all evidence, swallowed whole the assertions of Bush (with whom they had little sympathy) about Chavez’s electoral bad faith. In fact, you could have looked to an entirely nonpartisan international source, Amnesty International, which in a report last year charged that Chavez and his minions “have established a pattern of clamping down on dissent through the use of legislative and administrative methods to silence and harass critics. Laws are being used to justify what essentially seems to be politically motivated charges, which would indicate that the Venezuelan government is deliberately targeting opponents."
In her post on the dispute, Caitlin Dickson, a blogger for The Atlantic, refers to Guillen as “infamously hot-tempered.” You’ll find no argument from this quarter--nor, indeed, from virtually any baseball fan (nor, I daresay, Guillen himself)--about that.
However, Dickson seems to have forgotten Penn’s own well-earned reputation for volatility. Paparazzi who’ve tangled with him have not, however.
Penn’s Hollywood colleague, actress-singer Maria Conchita Alonso, has, unlike Guillen, answered the actor point by point. After reading the actor's claim to talk-show host Bill Maher that Venezuela’s elections in the Chavez era were “transparent,” she wrote an open letter to Penn demonstrating why this was not so. Moreover, for the benefit of the American media-loathing actor, she explained why the situation was far worse in Venezuela, where Chavez controls more than 90% of media outlets.
A native of Cuba who lived for a long time in Venezuela, Alonso demonstrated the kind of historical perspective and direct experience that eluded Penn. She knows firsthand how Hollywood romanticized Fidel Castro in his first couple of decades in power (until, perhaps, his gay-bashing became infamous in Tinseltown), and sees incipient signs of the same syndrome now in a respected actor who overlooks the many faults of a caudillo who wants to become Castro’s successor as the man who defies the norteamericanos.
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